Bangalore Leveling the Office Playing Field

Bangalore led all Indian cities in startup financing in 2012, bringing in $131 million in 39 deals, according to Venture Intelligence.

When he used to take trips to Bangalore, as a product manager for a software firm in Silicon Valley, Brij Bhasin had a name problem. Despite his best efforts, he couldn’t stop his Indian colleagues from calling him “Mr. Bhasin” or “Sir.”

But after moving back to the city three years ago, he’s now just “Brij,” a switch he thinks is hugely telling. “This may seem trivial, but it completely changes the relationship between individuals,” said Mr. Bhasin, the entrepreneur-in-residence of GSF India, an angel funding network.

Mr. Bhasin was part of generation of Indians to flood Silicon Valley and help transform it into an innovation Mecca. Now he is among a smaller yet steady influx of technology veterans returning to their home country, with ideas and cash in tow, intent on transforming the place dubbed the “Silicon Valley of India.”

One transformation is to do away with the top-down structure that permeates Indian businesses. New startups are gradually leaving this structure behind. But whether India can adapt Silicon Valley’s work culture is a lingering question among the business elite.

At a recent conference, hosted by the All India Management Association, Kris Gopalakrishnan, the co-founder of Infosys, made the bar clear for the mostly young attendees. Every two years, a blockbuster innovation streams out of Silicon Valley, he said. “That’s what is expected of Bangalore.”

Many feel that Bangalore has a long way to go. It led all Indian cities in startup financing in 2012, bringing in $131 million in 39 deals, according to Venture Intelligence. But that is less than 5% of the funding and only a sixth of the deals in Silicon Valley in the third quarter alone.

“There’s the Valley. Then there’s everybody else,” said Mukund Mohan, chief executive of the Microsoft Accelerator, the tech giant’s incubator for young companies in Bangalore. He echoed the sentiments of many returnees, saying there is an ethos and network unique to northern California that breeds far greater willingness to take risks.

Managers here admit that prompting innovative, independent work without supervision can be much more difficult in Bangalore than in Bay Area offices.

“In India, people generally have an aversion to saying ‘no,’” said Vaman Kamath, the founder and managing director of communication consultancy Confidence Architects. In one of his recent workshops, participants in Bangalore were asked to list their biggest workplace fears. Voicing dissent neared the top.

Some of the troubles that come with deference to bosses are dissolving, several industry executives claim, and new, leaner companies are looking to ditch the strict hierarchies associated with corporate India.

Mr. Mohan, a Bangalore native, spent 15 years in Silicon Valley working for large software firms and tiny startups. He returned to India four years ago and has begun to see the leadership structure of companies quickly mimic competitors in California.

“The startup culture here is changing,” he said. “The product companies tend to be fairly flat,” with decisions coming from the entire staff, not strictly the executives.

Part of this leveling comes by virtue of the industry. To reach customers and win investors, technology companies are more reliant on young staffers, not just for their fluency with the latest coding tools but also for their development and marketing inputs.

GSF India, another early funding network, is incredibly young. Leaving out its founder, the average age of staff is 28. Startup chief executives and employees across the city are often even younger.

“The old guard has to engage and encourage the younger staff to drive new ideas or risk becoming irrelevant,” Mr. Bhasin said.

Indian companies that engage younger staff tend to lag in spreading the benefits, a principle Mr. Mohan calls “shared risk, shared reward.” Founders here tend to hole up stock and deny employees perks of success, he said. He credited smaller firms for outdoing larger ones, but stressed that both lacked enough of this trait.

In Bangalore conferences and startup sessions, seasoned entrepreneurs repeatedly emphasize the importance of working as a team. It’s partly a plea to unburden solo CEOs. But it’s also designed to buck a work ethic that some charge with harming group dynamics. Tasks that require collaborative work can be more difficult here than in Silicon Valley.

“The education system has taught people to compete with one another and I think that often seeps into office culture,” says Mr. Kamath.

But some of the restraints, Mr. Kamath and others suggest, are more than cultural. Bangalore startups face a harsh climate, with early stage investing in India only nascent and reaching few pockets. Many companies have to bootstrap, or fund their enterprises themselves. Ahimanikya Satapathy, an entrepreneur behind the group Bootstrap Bangalore, estimated that 95% of Bangalore startups survive on bootstrapping alone.

Despite the hurdles, Silicon Valley veterans remain enthusiastic about Bangalore, as fresh companies are combating the cultural preference for big brands and steady jobs that kept some talent away from startups. It is, like the use of honorific titles, melting away.

The first group of companies to move through GSF India included one headed by a young founder fresh out of college. He moved to the startup after just three months at Google. Mr. Bhasin recalled warning the founder of his choice, concerned that his family would disapprove of its rashness. “Not so long ago, [parents] would advise to stick to standard career paths,” he said.

But Mr. Bhasin was proved wrong. The founder, like a growing number of Bangalore entrepreneurs, was happy to report his parents’ approval. His father even recommended his accountant.

Mark Bergen is a freelance reporter based in Bangalore. You can follow him on Twitter @mhbergen. Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

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